Convene for the iPad and Android Classroom

by Neena de Leon on July 09, 2019 and last update on July 09, 2019

More and more schools are starting to embrace tablets to replace traditional textbooks with digital technology in an effort to engage students, increase learning, and improve their ability to compete on a global stage.

But it doesn’t end with just digitised textbooks. The introduction of mobile technology provides an unprecedented opportunity to share, present, and collaborate on information in real-time. Sadly, this capacity is largely under-utilised in the classroom.

Until now.

Convene is a cross-platform application for real-time presentation of documents and collaboration. Convene makes it easy for educators to distribute and broadcast lessons and teaching materials such as documents and images to a number of mobile devices such as iPads, iPhones, and Android tablets. With Convene installed on mobile devices and tablets, teachers and professors can deliver their lessons to students not only within the confines of the classroom but also beyond the school walls: on the field or in their homes—as long as they have an internet connection.

Convene’s page synchronisation feature allows the teacher to control what is displayed on the screens of students’ tablets. Whenever they flip the pages of the materials in their own tablet or PC, the students’ devices will show the same page. Aside from page synchronisation, the teacher can use the built-in laser pointer to direct students’ attentions to specific areas on documents and images. The teacher can also share her annotations with the students in real-time to supplement the content of the course materials or show freehand writing and drawings through a virtual blackboard.

During the class, students can use Convene’s annotation tools to add their own sticky notes, create drawings, or highlight lines of text in their own copies of the material being discussed by the teacher. Outside of class, students can download and review the class materials on their own. Once downloaded, documents can be viewed even without an internet or WiFi connection.

Teachers or professors who have Box and Dropbox accounts can retrieve their documents and files by importing them to Convene and then using the files during the class. They can even add documents or images on the fly while a class is in progress without having to recreate the session.

Support for Box and Dropbox apps is helpful because teachers and professors never know when they need supporting documents or files in the middle of a discussion.